An ethnic group originally living in forests and mountains in northeast China, the Manchus excelled in archery and horsemanship. Children were taught the art of swan-hunting with wooden bows and arrows at six or seven, and teenagers learned to ride on horseback in full hunting gear, racing through forests and mountains. Women, as well as men, were skilled equestrians. 

 

Population: 9,846,800

Major areas of distribution: Virtually scattered over all of China, the largest group, about 46.2 per cent of the total, live in Liaoning Province, and the rest mostly in Jilin, Heilongjiang, Hebei, Beijing, Gansu, Shandong, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Ningxia, as well as in Chengdu, Xi’an, Guangzhou and other cities.

Language: Manchu (in both script and spoken language) and Han (standard Chinese)

Religion: Shamanism

Like the Han people, the majority ethnic group in China, over 70 per cent of the Manchus are engaged in agriculture-related jobs. Their main crops include soybean, sorghum, corn, millet, tobacco and apple. They also raise tussah silkworms. For Manchus living in remote mountainous areas, gathering ginseng, mushroom and edible fungus makes an important sideline. Most of the Manchu people in cities, who are better educated, are engaged in traditional and modern industries.

Manchus have their own script and language, which belongs to the Manchu-Tungusic group of the Altaic language family. Beginning from the 1640s, large numbers of Manchus moved to south of the Shanhaiguan Pass (east end of the Great Wall), and gradually adopted Mandarin Chinese as their spoken language. Later, as more and more Han people moved to north of the pass, many local Manchus picked up Mandarin Chinese too.